Heartland leader details curriculum

Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast confirmed Tuesday the group is developing a new school curriculum that urges teachers to question global warming science.

"It's very politicized. It's very superficial. Many kids get to watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore over and over again and they pass that off as scientific construction. It's not," Bast told The Wall Street Journal editorial page in a video interview. "It's just a propaganda film."

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The Heartland Institute’s project, Bast said, is designed to “bring real research and real science into the classroom. Teach kids about critical thinking. Let them understand, to try to find the human fingerprint on climate is a big challenge. And it's an exciting quest."

"And if you want to become a scientist, there are opportunities for you to study climate, to study heat transfers in the ocean, and for all these different things and not present it to them as just some sort of liberal narrative that starts with, 'the science debate is over, there's nothing more to learn about it and ends with, we all have to surrender our rights in order to immediately save the planet from catastrophe,'” he said.

Bast’s comments come amid the fallout of Heartland Institute documents climate scientist Peter Gleick obtained by using a false name and subsequently fed to bloggers.

Gleick, president and co-founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, confessed Monday to using a fake name to contact the Heartland Institute in trying to confirm the validity of a two-page memo, which he said was sent to him at the start of the year by an anonymous source. After the Heartland Institute sent him additional materials, Gleick wrote on his Huffington Post blog that he shared all of the documents with bloggers and other media outlets without altering them.

But Heartland insists that two-page memo is fake, and Bast on Tuesday accused Gleick of writing it after obtaining the group’s internal documents.

"He read those documents, concluded there was no smoking gun in them, and then forged a two-page memo in order to make it look like we were conspiring to discourage teachers from teaching science in classrooms, and in other ways doing this nefarious stuff," Bast said.

Beyond the two-page “confidential memo,” Bast didn’t dispute the validity of the other documents during The Wall Street Journal interview.

"The documents taken from us don't show any scheming, any kind of dishonest transactions, any attempt to suppress debate,” he said. “Just the opposite. It's an open plan that we write about all the time, quote on our website, put it in newsletters to our donors. All of that information is there."

Bast also said Gleick’s confession compared to "Climategate,” the 2009 episode where thousands of emails and other data from top scientists were stolen from an English university server and then spread on the Internet. Both show "how desperate these scientists are" in trying to quash climate skeptics,” he said.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 12:45 p.m. on February 22, 2012.